When there's evidence that there's something fishy in the Texans' locker room? Two people on a squad doesn't seem terribly fishy to me. Certainly it seems reasonable to expect that there would be teams with more than one person juicing even if they hadn't conspired together. If I were to make a guess, I would guess that every locker room has at least two guys in it on PEDs.

My purely speculative guess on the number of players in the average NFL locker room using PEDs is somewhere in the 50-53 range. So I wouldn't call 2 players getting caught fishy at all, more like regression toward the mean.

Yeah, I mean assuming that some benefits are derived from using PEDs, surely if one or two players are using then others are almost obliged to follow if they want to compete on a level playing field? In the end nobody is any better off, but if everyone is clean then there will always be the incentive for somebody to cheat. So the only equilibrium status is for everyone to cheat.

Of course the way to prevent this would be to test rigourously, and punish severely. I don't really know how rigourously the NFL tests its players, but they certainly don't seem too interested in severely punishing the ones they catch.

I think the scale of punishments is fine; problem is that I suspect the tests don't really work well enough to catch a large proportion of users even if the regime were more rigourous. There really probably isn't a solution.

Indications seem to be that the team knew about the coming suspension some time in August, when they brought Ephraim Salaam and Charles Spencer in for a workout. They've now added Salaam to resume his role as the swing tackle while Butler starts.